I was unfaithful to my husband with an astrologer last winter. I made the appointment with the famous man to find out if I'd ever crack my writer's block. I believe the secrets of the universe are everywhere. Why wouldn't the planets be holding a few?

"You don't seem married," the astrologer said after I'd made a few introductory comments: full disclosure of my husband's Virgo-ish view of both astrology and credit card debt, along with the irony that I was spending $150 to find out if I had a hope in hell of paying my AmEx bill before I was forced to fess up and create a crisis in my marriage—at which point I definitely wouldn't be able to write, because I could be living on the street. I threw in some stuff about the money issues in my husband's first marriage as well as a few gory details about the affair he'd had that brought his former life crashing down.

The astrologist's non sequitur of an observation shut me up. And not in a good way. Was not seeming married a compliment? An insult? Something else? I began to feel unmoored.

"You seem up for anything," he continued. "Like you're ready to give up your phone number to whoever asks."

Okay. It was an insult. I knew because my cheeks burned. And it's true! I am up for anything! On the other hand, no one has proposed much of anything. What a perfectly Libran predicament.

"If you're not writing by May, I'd begin to worry," the astrologer concluded.

I tore off a check and walked out. Then I got mad. What was it about me that said "not married"? What does "married" look like? For that matter, what does "up for anything" look like? That astrologer pulled me back down to earth. (He also forgot to give me my chart.) I hated that I'd offered him even innocuous details about my marriage. How dare he? It got me thinking about marriage and privacy. When is it okay to talk about your marriage, when isn't it, and who decides? Is privacy a trust issue, a loyalty issue, or more about context and intention—invasion of marital privacy versus lunch with your best friend?

I'm not the kind of woman who blabs marital intimacies to a stranger on a plane out of some deranged need for attention, coupled with a moronic ignorance of where I leave off and another person begins. I'm hyperaware of boundaries, no doubt because I had a childhood in which some crucial ones were crossed. I know my own fault lines. They lead me to worry that at any moment I could turn into the devil in my marriage. Philosophy professor Robert Solomon, in his book About Love, says one characteristic of a good marriage is the belief that your partner is a better person than you are. By Solomon's standard, my marriage qualifies. Except my husband really is a better person than I am. He's modest, loyal, slow to judge, forgiving, and honest. He doesn't have to think about boundaries, he just gets them, in his bones. I think of myself as a good-enough person. So let's just say I'm better acquainted with the dark side of my husband's exemplary qualities.

I'm promiscuous, for one thing. Not sexually. At least not to date. When my husband was out of work for a time, spending his days much like I spend mine—i.e., at home engaged in what looks an awful lot like vague, unproductive activity—I had to stifle a growing impatience. Get a job, already! I found myself thinking. What if I want to have an affair? That's what I mean. I've been married for 16 years, but I'm ambivalent about the institution. I love and need its security; I worry about its unfortunate tendency to narrow life's possibilities.

What I am is verbally promiscuous. (See astrologer, above.) I wasn't always. I used to be so opaque as to earn the nickname Sphinx in some quarters. Playing it close to the vest was less my style than an element of my personal defense system, cobbled together from fear that personal disclosure would reveal only wounds that had yet to scar over. When I became a writer and learned how to hide behind bolder personae, when I began my relationship with Zoloft, when after zillions of psychotherapy sessions I made a life I loved—when I grew up—I turned out to have plenty to say and was no longer shy about saying it. These days, you can see right through me, and I'm pretty sure many of my writing students and some of my friends occasionally wish I would shut up.

My husband is a man like many other husbands, I think. He is extravagantly unforthcoming with anyone outside our team of two. I find his reticence admirable, alien, and sexy. I don't know if his reserve is a reflection of our contented domestic life, a gender-specific tic, an aspect of his limited number of close friends (me), a mild form of Asperger's syndrome, or an arrangement with the CIA. I don't care. I like it. Yes, there's a discomfiting gender split there, but I don't feel any need to reconcile it.

Women talk to one another about men more or less freely from puberty on. The freedom to exchange private information about boys is one of the first ways we declare our independence from parents. We learn early on that boy talk is a social lubricant. And when a romantic enterprise crashes and burns, whom else do we convene to judge the clues leading to its demise but a jury of our peers? That freewheeling talk tends to stop when the honeymoon is over. Short of real marital crisis—when we may turn to a trusted friend or relative or professional marriage whisperer—most of us dine out on innocuous marriage stories, not the real deal. A woman enters marriage through a door and closes it firmly behind her. No one else is allowed to see in.

Prior to the eighteenth century, there wasn't any privacy. Astonishing, right? Laura Kipnis makes this point in her book, Against Love, in a discussion of our tendency to cast the past in our own modern image. She quotes the historian Phillipe Ariès: "Until the end of the seventeenth century, nobody was ever left alone." Whoa. Maybe your mind has already jumped to the lack of privacy in our own big bloggermouth of a world, what with The Real Housewives and Facebook and your monthly book club. Does marital discretion (the phrase sure sounds elegant and desirable) have more to do with moral character and personal dignity, or is it mere convention? In the old days, dignity must have been as hard to preserve as privacy, what with all those relatives and in-laws, their physical proximity and poor hygiene and annoying personalities—or the tempting opposite of those things—crowded into the same four walls. That literal lack of privacy is mostly unimaginable today. Yet everyone seems to agree that when it comes to child rearing, "it takes a village." We sigh nostalgically over those precious lost communities, where everybody looked out for everyone else. Why is marriage so determined to close the door behind itself? Are we ashamed of ourselves, of our messy married lives? What is it we're hiding? Or protecting?

A few years back, at a writer's colony in another country, I met a man I loved talking to. A sympathy sprang up between us, as it does whether certain individuals are married or not. He too was married—we were there without our spouses, consigned to watching the romantic entanglements that play out in such settings from the sidelines—and one night we went to dinner. Walking back to the village afterward, side by side in the unfamiliar darkening night, this lovely man confided some troubles in his marriage. I listened with the open, curious heart of a potential new friend. Then I dropped my guard and reciprocated. I told him things about my own marriage, private things. I told him that I'd married "against my nature," meaning I'd chosen a man who didn't excite the anxieties that had ruled and ruined most of my previous relationships. I'd never said such a thing out loud before and wasn't entirely sure it was even true, but I liked trying out my unfiltered self alongside someone I sensed might value the exchange. I spoke as a woman, not a wife, and maybe because he was a man and I am a wife, the sweetness of the sudden intimacy also contained a not unpleasant current of danger. The danger wasn't about an affair shimmering on the horizon; it was about making myself vulnerable to another human being, the heart-palpitating intimacy of reciprocal self-disclosure.

I didn't feel I'd invaded the privacy of my marriage, but some would say that any intimate conversation with a man (colleague, friend, stranger) who's not your husband is a violation of marital fidelity unless you tell your spouse about it—and it doesn't matter whether the tête-à-tête takes place in bed or even trespasses into your marriage. Think of all those films about adultery. There's typically that scene in which the woman (it's always the woman), lying in her lover's arms, hesitates to discuss her husband or marriage, though her lover prods. We see the discomfort cross her face. We might be rooting for her affair, but we see she's a good person, and so are we, so we draw the line along with her. (Unless her husband beats her up.) Maybe that's what was so bracing about Vera Farmiga's role as George Clooney's lover in Up in the Air. You'll have to see the movie to know what I mean. It's what's interesting to me as well about Edie Falco's character in the series Nurse Jackie. Nice husband, squirrelly lover, but Nurse Jackie draws an emphatic line. Then she snorts it.

I crossed the line at least once, while meeting a former lover for a drink. We'd had a brief affair years before, when he was married and I wasn't, and ran into each other by chance. The attraction was still there, but now the playing field was interestingly leveled. We were both flirtatious and provocative. I didn't plan to sleep with him, but I enjoyed toying with the possibility, enjoyed watching him toy with it, and it was a rush to feel his desire for me. He'd never met my husband, and though the few things I said about him during that flirtatious drink were pretty innocent, this encounter seems dodgier to me. I used my husband as conversational bait while pondering whether I'd sleep with another man.

I feel as squeamish as anyone about violating (or seeming to have violated) that sacrosanct thing: the special intimacy of one's marriage. But I have problems with the formulation that says verbal intimacy is as heinous as sexual infidelity. What's left to get us through the day, folks? Are married women so untrustworthy that they must take special care not to respond to the sympathetic gaze of a seemingly kindred spirit? Can we not be trusted to draw our own lines? Let's all wear burkas, in that case. Because we're all as capable of breaking trust as we are
capable of being fooled into seeing trust where none, in fact, exists.

Marriage isn't just an institution. It's flesh-and-blood couples, each unit as vast and complex as the universe, each tiny world utterly unique, and even our best friends, the ones able to listen carefully and answer their e-mail at the same time, can never know the real story about our marriage, hard as we try to tell it. It's the unintentional revelations that, for one fleeting moment, part the curtains of marriage—the way he criticizes her in public, the look they exchanged that time they left the restaurant in such a hurry. We share knowing looks with our own mate, temporarily buoyed by the fleeting (and probably fraudulent) feeling that compared with them, we're just fine.

Something different happens when you knowingly take that small step away from your marriage, shape it into a narrative, follow the conversational crumbs, verge onto the side roads only to abandon them moments later, in conversation utterly spontaneous yet arranged just so for that sympathetic listener: the friend who sits face-to-face with you and tries to resist looking at her watch—even though her gaze now and then clearly strays to the cute waiter across the room—the one who will remember every single word you've said three months from now even as you say it all again, talking to your friend as if to yourself, urgently or not, opening your heart. And maybe the story you tell, which happens to be the story you're in, will have something dazzling or surprising or even lifesaving to tell you, if you're engaged in the words and telling it true. The telling lifts the veil from no one's eyes but your own. And just possibly, if you break and enter the marital cocoon skillfully enough, when you return home to your husband, you might even see him again as if for the first time.

In his book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Stanley Cavell, Harvard's Walter M. Cabot professor emeritus of aesthetics and the general theory of value, examines seven classic romantic comedies that were made between 1934 and 1949, including It Happened One Night, Adam's Rib, The Philadelphia Story, and The Awful Truth. Cavell finds models of ideal marriage by listening to the river of words between these celluloid couples: Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, among others. The famous costars bicker and spar. They're chattering lovebirds as well as bantering playmates and powerful adversaries. As an audience, we fall in love with them over and over again, as they do with each other. The reason, Cavell concludes, is that each couple is constantly recoupling. A marriage between freely chosen equals (as these pairs decidedly are) demands that couples constantly remarry. They duke it out verbally, each individual standing his or her ground, whether that ground is on the opposite sides of a blanket strung between two beds, in a courtroom, or in the pool house of a Main Line mansion. Their marital conversation makes the movement of love audible. If the words stop, Cavell says, so does the marriage.

Of course, the conversation does stop. It falls into a quiet murmur or gutters out in the glow of cozy complacency or can't be heard over the mutual barking of accusations or festers silently in a stalemate of hostility and hurt. When the conversation of marriage ceases in these old films, the characters always seem to go to Connecticut. Connecticut is the real-life equivalent of having lunch with your best friend and complaining about your marriage. When a woman invites others into the private sphere of her marriage, she acts as a free agent, as a single person. The instability that results, Cavell says, is what leads the man and woman back to marriage. If a couple is smart and lucky, and if the invasion of privacy is a single step back and not a prelude to nuclear winter (full-bore adultery, say), the too familiar mate can again look like the stranger he was in courtship. And the conversation of marriage can begin anew.

What evil might be unleashed in me if my husband were as verbally unfaithful about the two of us as I sometimes am? How might his free-agent behavior affect our marriage? I admit it makes me a tad uncomfortable imagining it. But maybe a little more destabilization could be a good thing. Maybe counting on his distaste for gossip makes me too comfortable. By not staking his independence from me that way, maybe he and our marriage are losing out.

"What are you working on?" my husband asks me.

"An essay about privacy in marriage," I say, waiting for the irony of this to register on his face. My husband is not a stranger to irony. Also, he is aware that for me, as for many writers, private life is my material. What are the chances that I wouldn't be writing about my marriage?

"Well, I hope you're not writing anything about us," he says.

"Don't be silly," I say, as he heads off to the kitchen to make a sandwich. I sound like one of those movie heroines cheerfully denying the newness of the expensive hat on her head to Cary Grant (this old thing?) and go back to the work of trying to find the courage and the craft to
figure out the awful truth of this subject.